Online Irish are midnight bargain hunters

It’s official. Not only do the Irish beat other nations at texting and chatting on our handsets, but we’re also savvy with our downtime, spending it bargain hunting on the web late into the night.

New research from eBay.ie finds that amongst all Europeans, the Irish do more late-night shopping on the web than anyone else.

With 41pc of all online sales occurring overnight in Ireland, our nearest competition of midnight bargain hunting is France, with 39pc, while only 36pc of UK residents shop through the night.

And we don’t shop at night because we are bored or simply too lazy to go down to the shops: the survey found that 74pc of Irish shoppers are "more concerned with finding the best price available rather than shopping for convenience".

What a bargain!

The study also found that, on average, us Irish don’t feel like we’ve got a bargain unless there is a discount of more than 37pc.

EBay gathered this information by looking at the amount of people who shopped at night from 8pm-8am and what they bought, this was then compared to the daytime shoppers between the hours of 8am and 8pm, over a period of one year.

Another interesting factoid from the habits of the online Irish: 100pc (!) of all DIY sales on eBay are done at night.

By Marie Boran

Photo: The Irish do more late-night shopping on the web than any other Europeans, research from eBay.ie suggests.